It’s here! The Early Look report gives HMDA heads like me a chance to preview 2016 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data in advance of the official fall release.
What happens is, ComplianceTech asks firms that have filed their HMDA reports for 2016 to share them in advance. To date, more than 125 lenders have, and that number will keep growing. Just scroll down to “2016 Early Look” in the “year” pulldown in LendingPatterns.com™ and you can easily sort through the early returns.
The scope of 2016 lending will become more clear as more lenders report data, but this is still a hefty sample. It includes more than five million HMDA LARs and the lenders that have shared data to date made more than a third of all mortgage loans in 2015.
The early leaders for individual lenders are not surprising. They are Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, and Quicken Loans, with a market share of more than 40 percent between the three of them. Wells is reporting $146.3 billion in home loans made during 2016. Chase is at $95 billion and Quicken just behind at $91 billion.
Looking at the entire cohort and not just the top three, what did surprise me was the large amount of jumbo lending. Of course it could be that all the big jumbo lenders have reported early and skewed the total, but of more than $750 billion in mortgage dollars aggregated in the Early Look, a good 42 percent was in jumbos. Since jumbo dollar amounts are higher you would expect to see a smaller percentage when it comes to numbers of loans, and this is true. Jumbos made up about 14 percent of the total.
Average first lien for the early look lenders in 2016 is $296,000 currently, while subordinate liens averaged $91,000.
Loan dollars skewed toward refinancings with this group at 52 percent to 45 percent for purchase mortgages. That ratio held up on the numbers side too, with 54 percent refis and 41 percent purchase loans.
A lot of mortgage dollars stayed on these lenders’ books in 2016. Forty-one percent was not sold into the secondary market. Interestingly, non-agency investors were beaten out by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae, with Fannie Mae the biggest agency investor, at 22 percent.
The kept-in-portfolio percentage by numbers of mortgages was considerably lower, at 27 percent, meaning those loans tended to have higher loan amounts as in the case of jumbos, a favorite for lender balance sheets because of their higher coupons. Fannie Mae again had the highest agency share, at 25 percent.
White borrowers got nearly two-thirds of the mortgages extended, as well as 58 percent of mortgage dollars. Asians were the minority group that got the most finance, nine percent, while Hispanics were the minority group with the biggest percentage of numbers of mortgages at eight percent.
Upper income borrowers received more than half of both mortgages and finance.
(Mark Fogarty is a journalist and analyst who has been covering the mortgage industry for more than 30 years.)
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